Codependency is a common component in many relationships during alcoholism and addiction, and it’s a problem that doesn’t go away during alcohol rehab. In some cases, it can reinforce the codependent relationship between the addict and their codependent partner – usually a spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, parent or child. It’s important that codependent behavior be addressed on both sides of the coin for both parties, separately and together, so that the alcoholic can learn to be independent and successful in alcohol addiction treatment and recovery on her own.

If you are looking for an alcohol rehab for someone you care about, contact us at Orchid Recovery Center today. We treat women who are ready to break free from drug and alcohol addiction through detox and psychotherapeutic treatment. Call now.

Codependency Help for Alcoholics At Alcohol Rehab

Alcoholics can begin to get the help they need to address codependency issues while still at alcohol rehab. Talking about the person who enabled their addiction by covering for them whenever possible, giving them money or a place to live, and allowing a relationship to continue despite the alcoholism can show the alcoholic just how damaging a relationship like this is for both people. The goal of addressing codependency in psychotherapeutic treatment is to help the addict identify the harmful effects of these relationships and to recognize that she is a powerful person capable of standing alone and being a person who doesn’t require anyone else to cover for her or her behavior.

Codependency Help for Loved Ones of Alcoholics During Alcohol Rehab

It is especially important that codependent parties make real progress with codependency issues while their loved one is in alcohol rehab. The space to breathe without having to worry about the addict in their lives means that they have time to go to therapy, attend 12 step support group meetings or other group therapy sessions that address negative relationships. Learning to identify codependent behavior and recognizing the deficit in their own lives that allows them to focus so heavily on someone else can mean that they are a healthier person ready to begin a functional and healthy relationship with the alcoholic they care about when she returns home.

Codependency Help for Loved Ones After Alcohol Rehab

Codependency help for those who love and support an alcoholic in recovery after alcohol rehab should take two forms: continued personal therapy and treatment without the alcoholic present and couples therapy or family therapy with the alcoholic. By continuing personal treatment and building a strong support system outside the codependent relationship, it’s possible to develop and maintain an identity outside of that codependent relationship. Choosing to enter into a group therapy with the alcoholic you care about gives you both the opportunity to work through day-to-day problems in a positive way and have an objective party help you both identify when you are slipping back into codependent behaviors.

Alcohol Rehab at Orchid Recovery Center

Are you looking for an alcohol rehab for a woman one you care about? Contact us today at Orchid Recovery Center and find out how we can help you, the alcoholic you care about and your relationship with her heal.

Women make a lot of choices during alcohol addiction that they have to live with for the rest of their lives – tattoos are just one of them. Many celebrities have bemoaned their tattoo choices, claiming that they were drunk when they got them. Waking up the next morning – or one day, years later in alcohol rehab – and looking at a tattoo gotten while under the influence can be a negative experience for many women. How do you handle those tattoos? What about other choices made under the influence that still haunt you after treatment? How do you handle those?

Tattoos and Alcohol Addiction

The name of an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. A cartoon character. A butterfly or dolphin or flower. An angry message. Whatever it is, you may have thought it was a good idea when you were drinking, but now… not so much. You have three choices when dealing with tattoos after alcohol rehab: get it covered up, laser it off, or embrace it. Be forewarned: laser treatments are painful, take years to be effective in some cases and may not work on some colors, especially yellow and green. Covering up a tattoo means, obviously, another tattoo, which you may also dislike in a few years – plus, the first tattoo may still be somewhat invisible underneath. Embracing it, the simplest and least expensive option, is often the most difficult mentally. Which one will work best for you?

Choices in Alcohol Addiction

There are other choices many alcoholics make during alcohol addiction that bother them in recovery. Some of them are not as visible as a tattoo, but they are haunting, nonetheless. Guilt associated with lies, theft, manipulations and other hurtful choices made under the influence are not easy to face when you come home. Neither is it easy to face the people you hurt. The best way to handle this is on a case by case basis. If there is any way to make amends to the person you hurt by offering an apology, repaying the money you took, or replacing a piece of property that you damaged, do it.

Dealing with Alcohol Addiction Choices After Alcohol Rehab

If there’s no way to fix the past with comparable actions, a sincere apology is one of the best things you can do. Working through feelings of guilt with a therapist is another option to help you let go of the past. Talking about what happened, telling the truth out loud – often for the first time – can be extremely cathartic. Talking through your feelings of guilt can also stop you from relapse, since this is one of the primary emotions that cause problems during recovery. A therapist can help you come up with ways to handle those feelings and process them in an effective way so that you don’t end up drinking to hide or drown those feelings.

Alcohol Rehab at Orchid Recovery Center

If you have not yet enrolled in an alcohol rehab, contact us at Orchid Recovery Center for women. We’re here to help you make the changes you need to start a new life without alcoholism.

Too often, alcohol and sex go hand in hand, whether you’re a college student on spring break or a professional woman having wine on a dinner date. Unfortunately, when alcohol addiction or alcoholism is in the equation, sex can take a morbid turn for both men and women. Diseases, unwanted pregnancies, planned pregnancies that end in miscarriage and the inability to get pregnant if you are trying are among the issues that women face when they struggle with alcoholism without treatment at an alcohol rehab facility.

Alcohol Addiction, Sex and Disease

You first heard it in grade school and afterschool specials: women who drink are more likely to have sex and regret it later than those who remain sober. Women who are addicted to alcohol are more likely than others to contract sexually transmitted diseases like Chlamydia, HPV, Hepatitis C, gonorrhea, and HIV. They are also more likely to experience unplanned pregnancies and those pregnancies, even if planned, can go dangerously awry if active alcoholism continues without treatment.

All of the sexually transmitted diseases listed above cannot only be life changing, they can all be passed to another partner before you even know you have it. Some of them are deadly; there is no cure for Hepatitis C or HIV at this time. Though it may seem easy enough to use protection, the fact is that when alcohol is a part of the equation, preventative measures are too often forgotten.

Alcoholism and Fertility

Unlike men, women don’t suffer as many reproductive issues while under the influence or actively an alcoholic. Women who are naturally reproductively challenged may have difficulties implanting a healthy pregnancy if they drink heavily and many have miscarriages early on if they drink a substantial amount on a daily basis, but in general, men will find that they are the ones who suffer from the greatest fertility issues due to alcoholism: reduced sperm count, reduced circulating testosterone, lower motility of remaining sperm and the chance of irreversible damage without abstinence attained through an evidence-based alcohol rehab program.

However, alcoholic women are more likely to be unhealthy in general and therefore may find their fertility challenged as a result.

Alcoholism, Alcohol Rehab and Pregnancy

A woman’s pregnancy is greatly affected by the amount of alcohol she drinks, especially if she is physically addicted and regularly abusing the drug. Miscarriage is the first risk: women in their first two trimesters who continue to drink heavily will experience a greater risk of losing the baby. Children who survive the pregnancy of an alcoholic mother will have a low birth weight and may have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and be developmentally disabled both physically and mentally. Mothers who continue to drink heavily after their children’s birth and are unable to care for them as a result may have their children taken away from them.

Alcohol rehab is the only way to safely abstain from drinking, especially during a critical period like a pregnancy. At an alcohol addiction treatment center focused on women and their needs, you will find the resources necessary to not only stop drinking but remain clean and sober after you return home. Get more information about alcohol rehab for women today at The Orchid.

Does the title of this post scare you when you think about getting sober?  Does it make you reconsider sobriety, even if all the arrows in your life are pointing in that direction.  OK, there may be one possible way to keep your entire social group when you decide to become sober.  Your entire social group gets sober right along with you.  If that sounds like a near impossible task, then you get the point.  Getting sober may be absolutely necessary for your life, it does require some real sacrifice and change on your part.

What Will You Do With Your Time Sober

You may be wondering what in the world you are going to do now.  What if you can’t hang out with the girls after work on Thirsty Thursdays, or on the usual Tuesday Happy Hour, or getting drunk together in the backyard throughout the summer while the guys grill?  And the ladies bowling league - every Saturday night for nine months out of the year.  And that doesn’t even count the times you drink at home, either on your own or with anyone who comes over.

When you take a closer look at it, you may be stunned at how deeply drinking is embedded into your daily life.  What do think about when it’s your usual time to drink?  Do you think about it much at all, or does it all seem pretty automatic anymore?  Work is done, it’s the weekend, it’s league night, a friend has dropped by - and you crack out the alcohol right away.  You drink until you are drunk most if not every time you start.  Most of the time, even if you say you aren’t going to drink that much, you get drunk anyway.

Social Influence Matters With Alcohol Recovery

How in the world could you stay sober if you kept up with that bowling league group, with your friends that drop by and drink with you, with the people that come over in the summer to grill and drink, stopping by Happy Hour and Thirsty Thursday with those friends?  The answer is that most likely you can’t.  Even if they are sympathetic to your needs, are they all going to stop drinking entirely when they are with you so you have no temptation?  If they all would, that is an incredible group of friends.  If not, you’ll need to make some decisions.

Perhaps after you have been in alcohol treatment, you might ask someone if they know of people who don’t drink while they bowl.  Maybe you can see that a few of your relatives or friends may not drink much to start with and would enjoy starting a different social tradition.  Or maybe some of the people you meet in AA already do some of these types of gatherings that you could attend.  Regardless, the reality is clear about your social group.  A dramatic change needs to take place if you are going to truly stay sober.

Alcohol Treatment Helps You Manage Your Fears

This may seem really hard to imagine, frightening because you don’t know how you’ll handle the boredom and loneliness.  Alcohol rehab can help you work through those fears and find solutions to you social struggles.  The support you find at alcohol treatment sessions can help you get through the valleys of alcoholism recovery.  Yes, you’ll need to make change, but you won’t have to be alone through it.

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Do you sometimes miss your drinking?  Do you wonder if you really needed to get sober, or if it was just your relatives being worry warts?  What was the harm anyway if you got drunk now and then?  Stop right there - don’t let another one of those rosy thoughts go by.  Do you know what happens when you let your mind think like that?  It’s addiction thinking sneaking up on you again.

Remember The Good Times Forget The Bad

Addiction thinking likes to make light of addiction, make it seem totally justifiable and basically harmless.  What a disaster if you were to fall for such a clever argument in your own mind.  Sometimes, nostalgia has a way of making parts of the past seem rosier than it really was.  In some ways, that is a good thing.

If you really had a good father in your life, you would much rather focus on positive memories than of the times he got mad at you.  And it’s probably a good thing mothers don’t always remember the gory details of delivering their babies, or most women may not want to ever do it again.  But for a recovering addict, a rosy colored picture of their addiction past can be toxic.

Slippery Slope Of Alcohol Addiction Thinking

Remember the DUI, the embarassing incident when you fell down the stairs and almost broke your leg, the blow-up arguments at family holiday gatherings, the exile from your grandmother because she just couldn’t deal with your lies anymore?  What if you saw the DUI as someone else’s fault, and really not a big deal?  What if you blamed someone else for tripping you down the stairs?  What if you said everyone at the family gatherings picked on you, and it had nothing to do with your drinking?  What if you said you really weren’t all that close to your grandma anyway?  You really enjoyed drinking, hanging out with your buddies all night, having few cares in the world most of the time - and now you aren’t sure why you ever gave it up.

Do you see the slippery slope you get on when you see the past in that rosy sort of way?  Do you see how the evidence of family destruction, legal problems, and health risks get swept under the rug because your memories are being manipulated by your addiction thinking?  You may become tempted to start drinking and not even realize the pit you are about to fall into.

Alcohol Rehab Can Get Your Thinking Back On Track

If you find yourself being nostalgic about your drinking days, you may need to find an alcohol treatment center soon.  Perhaps you may only need some stronger aftercare support rather than full-fledged alcohol rehab.  Or, if you have already started drinking again after feeling like your sobriety wasn’t that important, you may need to consider true alcohol rehab.  Relapse is a normal part of addiction recovery, but you don’t have to fall for the lies every time they crop up.  You can learn to spot these things before they steer you in the wrong direction.  Call an alcohol treatment center near you for more support.

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